Erik Wilde on Services and APIs

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Hunting HTML5 APIs

compiling an HTML5 API Overview is quite a bit more complicated than one would think. and because this will be an ongoing activity rather than a one-time shot, the newly created HTML5 API Overview is located at a permanent URI (like the Atom Landscape Overview), and updates to it will be reported on the blog.

this first version only lists the APIs which are specified in standalone W3C drafts. while i am not aware of any relevant efforts outside of the W3C (there may very well be some, please let me know if you know of any), there definitely is a set of APIs which are an integral part of HTML5 itself (as in: HTML5, the specification), and those are currently not listed in the overview. it's actually not all that easy to clearly distinguish between HTML5 the markup language and HTML5 the DOM API (to a certain extent, blurring or simply removing that distinction probably is one of the goals of HTML5), so this first set of APIs in the overview simply are those APIs which are clearly self-contained APIs and at least in theory could be used in non-HTML scenarios as well.